Levi, that third born son, hands dirty from dirt and earth and believing in seeds and small things, he’d kneeled in the kitchen with her white feathery quake, kneeled like praying, and he’d showed me how.

How to lace my hands around her at the heart, around that live bird trembling.

And I had held her, hardly held her, and the welcome was in the quiet we gave her, the cupping that said nothing but held.

“What do you say to a bird?”

Shalom, she’s bent and whispers it, one of her tendrils touching my cheek.

What do you say to the fledgling and caged, to the heart that stutters and pounds and hurts? What do you say to the fallen who can’t find the sky?

I know this. The warmth of the child’s breath falls on me and the son’s palms, it touches mine, and we are all close and the brevity of time encircles and regrets can clip at the edges of things meant to fly. Frittered away days can feel like this tether to dark.

I can feel the bird, her faint angst large and warm in between my hands.

This thrum, it is mine, and we beat together: All worry is a desperate wanting of my own way.

And I tell her, tell her with my palms, with this enfolding and inviting in and holy hush:

That perfection that you want, it will be the pin through you, right to the wall, right to the ground, and you’ll never know more.

Perfectionism is the prison that will bar you from unfolding into the wide open full life and release. And for all your work, you will flail and you will thrash and you will exhaust, and a cold wind will still blow straight down the nape of your neck —

that you are nothing but a pitiful creature who can’t get it all perfectly right.

And in your spent helplessness — it comes, like a stillness — this saving hopefulness.

Hear it, brave-beating heaving heart?

You don’t need higher self-esteem. You need greater self-grace.

God’s already offered you all of His grace.

I hold a bird in hand and that is all there ever would be.

Grace is all there is to live in and move and have your being and there is nothing else apart from it — grace the very power of God.

Grace is what fills your lungs and fills your veins; grace is the sleek pin that runs up through everything like spine shaft and upon which everything turns and holds, and grace gave us saving nails and grace gave us salvation freedom and grace gives us certain wings.

Shalom touches it’s pounding breast.

“Quiet. It’s quiet.”

And I nod, awed.

Only the pounding, beating fools are fooled:

Grace is not soft or trite — Grace is what saves and grace is what transforms. Grace isn’t the weakness of a Christian — grace is the completeness of a Christian. Grace isn’t ever a paltry thing — Grace is always the very power of God.

The power of God to save and to stand, to give and forgive, to breathe and believe, to laugh and love and wring the last little bit of living out of all the days under the sky. Grace is what we need more than very air or water; grace is what is necessary for life: it’s His very grace that needs to be sufficient today, it is His very grace that makes today sustainable.

It’s there in my hands — soft feathers that could take to the sun and this is paradox. Grace never negates obedience. Grace always initiates obedience.

And it’s something inside of me that unlatches, unlaces, and the bones of the fragile and frail, they open into wide winged things.

“What did you say to her, Mama?”

Shalom smiles…

“Just — ”

I only murmured grace — what all that soar know.

If you want to go deeper into joy…

If you want new, uncaging grace…

If you want to feel the opening of God’s fingers and hear the words Fly.

These sixty fresh and releasing devotional reflections, each one like a singular tree, invite you to take wing into a forest of graces.

Glimpses of graces that will lead you into your own lifestyle of Christ-focus and communion.

Into how your desperate need of Him every moment — is wildly met with His extravagant love for you.

Twenty-One Grains of Wheat | The View From Herea needed read: "...we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the call, because to not choose is to choose. The seeds have been planted, and the harvest will come. Will we be part of it?" @JeanneDamoff

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